| Humor at Work |
ISSUE 627 - Apr. 20, 2016 |
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WTF? Where's The Fun? |
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It's official Humor Month, so it's a great time to take stock of how well you are leveraging your humor resources at work. Here are eight things you can do to jump start more fun in your workplace:
1. Create a humor library at work - encourage people to use it, assign a book (such as, oh, I don't know... off the top of my head...perhaps The Humor Advantage?) and then hold a followup discussion and create a plan to turn ideas into action.
2. Create a "humor first aid kit" and stockpile it with funny office toys, props, etc. that will help people laugh during a serious emergency.
3. Create a rotating workplace jester position or humor at work squad to champion the importance of culture and fun at work. Rotate the positions to different employees every four months so no one gets burned out and different people get the chance to flex their creative muscles.
4. Add more humor to your meetings. Your meetings should reflect and help create the kind of culture you want at work, so use your meetings as a launching pad to help strengthen your culture, build relationships, and inject more fun into your workplace.
5. Start a collective humor at work file where you encourage employees to contribute funny observations, funny articles related to your business, and examples of accidental humor they come across. Then use the file to add some humor to your meetings, intranet website, presentations, and newsletters.
6. Create contests to boost the level of fun. It might be a contest for the funniest team photo, funniest team video, funniest team slogan, or an amateur comedy night where employees have a chance to flex their funny bones.
7. Create fun rituals and traditions. Rituals and traditions give everyone something to look forward to and something to reminisce about. Traditions are one of the key ways to strengthen any workplace culture.
8. Celebrate with a little fun. Hold a spoof Oscars celebration and award prizes for offbeat and wacky reasons ("The Employee Least Likely to Be Voted Off the Island Award" etc.).
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Mike's Fun at Work Tip |
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"Rocket Goat" here with another alter ego name generator for you to use during your next meeting as an icebreaker or to add some fun to a Friday (or heck, go crazy and do it on a Tuesday): Your Regrettable Super Hero Alter Ego Name.  |
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Quote of the Week |
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"Once organizational health is properly understood and placed in the right context it will surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage." Patrick Lencioni (Here! Here!)
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It's a Wacky World |
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There's unintentional humor - the kind of humor that arises from newspaper headlines such as, Kids Make Nutritious Snacks! And then there's really, really unintentionally funny humor that arises when companies do a really lousy job at translating messages into different languages, such as this English translation at a restaurant in Beijing:
"Our menus have been carefully chosen to be ordinary and unexciting. At dinner, our quartet will circulate from table to table, and fiddle with you."
And from the hotel that was home to this restaurant: "When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope. You will struggle to forget it."
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Copyright © 2016 Humor at Work. All Rights Reserved.
mike@mikekerr.com
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